6. Generate Comprehensive File Inventory
1. Hello, World!
2. Rename Photos by Capture Date
3. Organize Downloads Folder by File Type
4. Delete Old Log Files Automatically
5. Find Duplicate Files Using MD5 Hashing
6. Generate Comprehensive File Inventory
7. Parse Web Server Logs for Performance Metrics
8. Extract Emails, URLs, and Phone Numbers from Text
9. Track Daily and Monthly Active Users from Apache Logs
10. Generate Formatted Text Reports with Column Alignment
11. Analyze Sales Transactions and Generate Revenue Reports
12. Clean and Validate CSV Data
13. Convert JSON API Responses to CSV
14. Parse and Validate Configuration Files
15. Build a CLI Calculator with Argument Parsing
16. Parse and Display Weather Data from JSON
17. Build a Simple Inventory System with Classes
18. Generate Markdown Table from CSV Data
19. Aggregate Sales Data by Time Period
20. Recursive Directory Size Calculator with Filtering
21. Parse and Transform XML Configuration Files
22. Find and Replace Across Multiple Files
23. Build a Simple Template Engine
24. CSV Data Validator with Business Rules
25. Build a Multi-Format Log Analyzer

Challenge

Problem

IT administrators, compliance teams, and migration planners need detailed file inventories before system changes. This drill teaches you to scan directory trees and generate CSV reports with comprehensive file metadata: names, paths, sizes, modification dates, and types. You'll learn CSV generation, file metadata extraction, data aggregation, and report formatting.

Difficulty: Beginner

Instructions

  1. Recursively scan the specified directory for all files
  2. Collect metadata for each file: filename, full path, size (MB), modification date, file type (extension)
  3. Sort files by size (largest first)
  4. Generate CSV with headers: Filename,Path,Size_MB,Modified,Type
  5. Add summary statistics at the end:
    • Total files: X
    • Total size: Y.YY MB
    • File types: .txt (5), .jpg (3), .pdf (2)
  6. Output to 'file_inventory_YYYY-MM-DD.csv'

Files

Editable
Read-only

Hints

Hint 1

Find.find recursively traverses directories

Hint 2

File.size returns bytes, divide by 1048576.0 to get MB

Hint 3

File.mtime.strftime('%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S') formats the date

Hint 4

CSV.open(filename, 'w') creates a new CSV file

Hint 5

Use csv << [array] to write rows

Hint 6

Time.now.strftime('%Y-%m-%d') for today's date in filename

Hint 7

group_by with transform_values counts occurrences by type

Provided Files (Read-only)

1. Basic inventory - 3 files

Input: 
generate_inventory('files')
Expected Output: 
Generated inventory: file_inventory_2024-10-27.csv
Total files: 3
Total size: 1.50 MB

2. Single file inventory

Input: 
generate_inventory('files')
Expected Output: 
Generated inventory: file_inventory_2024-10-27.csv
Total files: 1
Total size: 0.00 MB

3. Multiple file types

Input: 
generate_inventory('files')
Expected Output: 
Generated inventory: file_inventory_2024-10-27.csv
Total files: 4
Total size: 1.50 MB
+ 2 hidden test cases